Hardware & Biology: Durable Moats Beyond Code
The hosts:
Max Lebeau, Positron Ventures
Isabel Zhang, HCVC
What is this Ripple about?
As AI commoditizes software features overnight, hardware and biological systems offer structural defensibility that code cannot match. This Ripple explores how founders and investors can build durable advantages by navigating capital intensity, regulatory complexity, and physical/biological constraints - and why the next decade of defensibility lives in atoms and cells, not algorithms.
Why this topic timely or urgent in 2026
The software moat is dead. Every SaaS feature is replicable within weeks; every model training gap closes within months. Meanwhile, deeptech founders are discovering that the hardest problems to commoditize are those rooted in physics and biology: fermentation scale-up, cell manufacturing, hardware integration, regulatory pathways, and proprietary biological datasets. Investors are noticing. Capital is flowing toward hardware and wetware not because software is boring, but because AI has made it defenseless. This shift is accelerating, and founders/VCs built on software assumptions need new mental models fast.
Key questions or challenges being explored
What structural advantages do hardware and biological systems create that software alone cannot?
How can hardware and bio startups capitalize on AI's hunger for data, the increasing need for experimental validation, and manufacturing bottlenecks?
Hardware and wetware take time to develop - how can founders and investors navigate the speed-defensibility trade-off?
Who would get the most value from attending this Ripple?
Hardware and wetware founders reassessing defensibility and market strategy in an AI-heavy world; Software founders and investors recognizing software moats have eroded, exploring pivots into deeptech, biotech, or hardware-software hybrids; Biotech/deeptech investors looking to sharpen thesis on what actually creates durable value.